Visualizing Human Rights Data

How long did you contemplate this fact? Can you translate numbers into faces? Did you question its accuracy? What does it mean to you and the life you lead?

Nonprofits, humanitarian organizations and development agencies are infamous for splashing statistics across their websites and outreach materials. These attempts to quantify global human rights issues are necessary for strategic planning, funding and program evaluation. However, they do little in the way of provoking a level of empathy that translates into individual action. Numbers are impersonal.

Shankar Vedantam best explains our penchant for helping a single stranger over a large group of strangers in his article, The Little Lost Dog at Sea. Using the example of an internationally backed rescue mission to save a dog abandoned at sea, Vedantam posits that the same outpouring of support would not have happened if there had been, say, 100 dogs onboard. We are more likely to help when the issue is presented on a scale we can cope with, one that promises a moral sense of return. Getting at the ineffectiveness of large-scale humanitarian statistics, Vendantam explains:

Our empathic telescopes are activated when we hear a single cry for help….When we think of human suffering on a mass scale, our telescope does not work, because it has not been designed to work in such situations. Humans are the only species that is even aware of large-scale suffering taking place in distant lands; the moral telescope in our brain has not had a chance to evolve and catch up with our technological advances.

Consider all the statistic-laden reports that humanitarian groups pump out annually on maternal health, water borne illnesses, genital mutilation, etc. A majority of this data remains buried in Excel tables.

[Enter data visualization tools]

The potential to translate raw data into digestible graphics is incredible. A number of humanitarian organizations are already experimenting with graphics that display their statistics in a meaningful, compelling, and interactive way. Below are three examples of creative ways to present human rights data in a way that readers can visually conceptualize.

1) Gapminder World: The title of this graph is “Africa is Not a Country.” Using an interactive scatter chart, Gapminder illustrates the life-expectancy discrepancy amongst African nations, in a global context. As displayed, referring to “African” issues is misleading because each nation falls along a different notch of this single human development indicator. Also, if you hit the play button at the bottom of the graph, you can watch as certain colors (global regions) pull ahead from 1800, as others lag behind.

2) Invisible Children’s LRA Crisis Tracker: In my opinion, this is one of the most effective displays of human rights data employed by a humanitarian organization. Invisible Children’s mission is to stop the use of child soldiers in Central Africa and, here, they track the detailed cases of violence inflicted by the Lord’s Resistance Army. This graphic makes use of social media, a news ticker, real-time stats, and an interactive map and timeline. Below is a screen shot – I recommend checking it out at http://www.lracrisistracker.com

3) I customized my own graph, using data from Human Development Reports and Google Public Data tools. My initial inspiration for this post was a lecture in my current Gender and Women’s Studies course at UW-Madison. Professor Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel pointed out the fact that, read alone, the Human Development Index (HDI) can paint a misleading picture of a nation’s level of development. While the HDI takes health, education and living standards into account (measured via life expectancy at birth, mean and expected years of schooling, gross national income per capita), these standards do not account for gender-specific issues. In fact, a separate index – the Gender Inequality Index (GII) – was developed in light of this defect.

Below, you can see how I self-selected countries to illustrate the fact that the United States has plenty of room for improvement. By HDI standards, the U.S. is one of the most developed nations; however, by GII standards, less “developed” countries like Singapore, Israel, and Croatia are more progressive on the gender equality front.

2 Responses

Awesome post Erin! Thanks for sharing the links to these visualization tools. I think that Vendantam is exactly right that it’s hard to feel moved by so many people in crisis because the scale is so hard to comprehend. I’m glad you figured out how to display the graphs 🙂

Thanks for helping me with the graph! I’ve got a lot to learn when it comes to using data visualization tools, but it’s nice to know my science journalism friends are willing to entertain my questions – I appreciate it!